


whisper in my ear

by limned



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Budapest, Developing Relationship, F/M, Partnership, Post-Battle of New York (Marvel)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-28
Updated: 2017-04-28
Packaged: 2018-10-24 21:12:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,048
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10749924
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/limned/pseuds/limned
Summary: When he refocuses, Natasha is looking at him with the same smile from years ago.





	whisper in my ear

The meal is strange on about a dozen levels, but the oddest part is how Natasha never stops looking at him for very long. Clint can feel it almost as a physical thing, the way her eyes shift away and then come back like a reflex, flicking over his face and his body like she needs to keep checking that he’s still there.

She barely seems to notice when he looks back at her. She doesn’t look tense or upset, nothing bad that he can identify – she’s exhausted from the fight and half-awake from food coma like the rest of them, but she still keeps doing it, her eyes running a pattern with him at the center. It’s disorienting enough that he stops trying to make sense of it.

Stark and Banner are already standing and Thor is shaking Rogers awake when he gets it. He sits up a little, and blinks, and says, “Oh,” under his breath, and when he refocuses, Natasha is looking at him with the same smile from years ago.

.

Budapest was not what they expected. According to the S.H.I.E.L.D. analysts, they were set to infiltrate the Hungarian division of an arms trafficking ring that sidelined in human cargo.

Yeah, no.

It turned out to be a bunch of American and German dropouts from Eötvös Loránd University who had decided that cigarette smuggling was way easier and more profitable than trying to pass their economics exams. They had zero involvement with arms or sex trafficking, but unfortunately for them, they’d done a little business with extremely dangerous people who were deep into both of those things. The best Clint could figure, these guys were so terrible at basic communications security that the analysts had mistaken them for the real group who actually knew how to do illegal shit the right way.

They were also possibly the biggest group of douchebags he'd ever seen in one place. Which didn’t make it easy to talk Natasha down when she wanted to kill all of them on general principle before the first week was up.

By the middle of the second week Clint was only stopping her because Coulson had hacked his DVR and cheerfully promised to delete the Packers/Vikings game if he didn’t. Fury wanted them to stay in place and try to draw out the actual bad guys.

It was the dullest month Clint had ever done in the field. Unique, he had to admit, because the douchebags spent nearly every waking minute at a huge tourist nightclub on Nagymező, so his position was high in the rafters above the banks of multicolored strobe lights. Natasha had infiltrated the group through one of the Americans, a jackass who couldn’t believe his luck at being able to flaunt her around his friends, although thankfully he was also a blackout drunk and more than a little afraid of her. It kept the unpleasantness to a minimum. If she’d had to tolerate much more than the guy groping her in the club, Clint wasn’t sure he could have kept deflecting the killing thing.

He got so bored in the third week that he started talking to her through the field comms even when it wasn’t necessary. 

"Hey, I think I’m developing epilepsy from these fucking lights,” he said first, bright and conversational. “Remind me to check S.H.I.E.L.D.’s insurance coverage for that.”

He was looking at her – of course – so he saw when Natasha’s mouth twitched as she fought back a smile and glanced up. She raised her drink to her lips and murmured, “Don’t bitch about the coverage, Barton. You’re walking now, aren’t you?”

It was so surprising and awesome that he could only laugh and say, “True. Very true,” and after a while he added, “I really appreciate that they stitched me back together so I could watch you pretending to do Jäger shots with these assholes. It’s very fulfilling. Career-wise.”

She didn’t break character and smile at that one, or at anything else he said for the next two weeks, but it didn’t stop him from talking. It was enough that she kept sending the occasional look at the ceiling. It made him feel better than he wanted to admit. He’d been out of commission from the leg shot for two months and they hadn’t had a mission together for a month before that. It felt so good to be working in tandem again, even something as ridiculous as Budapest.

They got free after they finally convinced HQ of what they’d known for almost the whole month, that the real targets weren’t going to contact these idiots again. Coulson cleared them to come home and they met at Keleti station within an hour.

The first thing Natasha did was to hit him in the shoulder hard enough that he staggered back a step. Then she hooked her arm through his elbow and said, “Good to have you back,” and he forgot to complain about the punch when she smiled up at him, open and warmer than he’d ever seen, and he still felt a little rocked when she laughed and pulled him toward their train.

.

The others are out on the street and Clint knows they should be following, but he doesn’t want to do anything but sit here and look back at her. Natasha’s hand is curled around his knee and he feels half-drugged, the way she’s looking at him and the bright curve of her smile. 

“Seriously?” he manages, at last. “Just like Budapest? You’re out of your mind.”

Natasha reaches for his hand and he reaches back automatically, locking their fingers together, and she moves her thumb slowly over his knuckles. “Well,” she says. Her voice has a hesitant tone that he can’t remember hearing before. “Good to have you back this time, too.”

She’s still looking at him and it’s harder to breathe than it was, way back in Budapest, because this is something new. “Yeah,” he says. “It’s good.”

Her hand is so warm. He knows they should stand up and walk outside before someone comes back to check on them, but he’ll take this small space of watching her, looking back, and knowing that everything has finally changed.


End file.
